I have known Eileen longer than any other living person, and our ways of thinking have much in common. So when she started to wonder aloud about what happens after death, it set me thinking too.
We are both of an age when the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse throws his shadow across our path. Though we are, for octogenarians (Eileen is a couple of years older than me), in fairly good health, it is only reasonable for us to consider that death may strike us in the next few years. I think that both of us can remain peaceful at the prospect (I was going to write ‘possibility’, but of course like taxes, death is not just possible or probable, but certain).
The uncertainties concern not the reality of death, but what comes before it, and what follows it. What comes before it can still be daunting. I can think of two episodes which prepared me for it. One was in a hospital. A radiologist was x-raying me to discover the cause of diarrhoea which had lasted for months. He splayed me on a huge machine and snapped away, assisted by a nurse who changed the plates. At one stage he seemed to be particularly active, moving in repeatedly on one area of my stomach. I asked him had he seen something. “Yes,” he said, “I think I see a growth there.” To me ‘growth’ implied cancer, and cancer implied a fight for survival. In the event, what he saw was not cancerous, but I remember well the impact of his words on me. I was almost relieved that at last there was something we could tackle.
Death is always a possible, every time we sit in a car or cross the road, so it was no shock to hear him name the enemy. It convinced me that if I do contract some serious illness, I would want to name it, know its profile, and map the battlefront in my body with a clear sense of who’s winning the battle, and the point at which, as they say, “it’s only a matter of time”.
The second episode was not in a hospital, but on the road, in the saddle of a two-week-old motorbike, a beautiful Kawasaki 550. It was a bright afternoon, but an approaching motorist, clean out of petrol, was so worried by his blinking red light that he failed to see the approaching motorbike. He saw a petrol station on my side of the road and swung across my path. As I collided and flew through the air, I felt my helmet hit the ground twice before I came to rest, quite conscious. Those who ride motorbikes must always be aware of the particular risks they run, with no airbags or panels to lessen the impact of a crash. I
remember my first thought: I’m alive, hurt but alive, and my head has not suffered. I was able to give bystanders three phone numbers to ring, before the pain of a shattered hip and pelvis swallowed me up.
One overriding desire emerges from those two episodes. It is, in the prayer of Dr Winnicott: May I be alive when I die. The alternative is visible in so many old people’s homes, and in my memory of my mother’s last years: the spectre of dementia, the gradual loss of the mind, which robs our loved ones of their ability to remember, to recognise, to love and to converse. It is a slow death for the patient, a lingering goodbye for those who love them. It has often been said that dementia hits the families harder than the patient. I wonder. Even when well cared for, bright old people must suffer acutely from seeing their memory lose its grip and their faculties disintegrate. So – blessings on the scientists who are seriously searching for a cure, and Lord, in your kindness save me from that slow death. May I be alive when I die!
Preparing for death used to be clear-cut, getting things off one’s chest, clearing one’s conscience, using the help of a priest. As a priest I remember lovely encounters of this sort. An old Irish docker in New York, who had drifted away from his roots and from the Church, was overjoyed to see a priest as he faced the end, and found that he still knew the words of the Hail Mary. The anonymous but familiar figure of a priest makes it easier to talk about the death you face – easier than when talking to family, who may feel it their duty to deny the approach of the end.
It should not be this way. Of the many ways to die alone, the most comfortless and solitary is when family and friends conspire to deny the approach of death. They may feel: I couldn’t take away her hope. But without acceptance of the truth, they remove the possibility of
spiritual companionship at the end.
Dr Sherwin B. Nuland, in his extraordinary book How we die, remembers with regret how the family conspired to avoid the truth when his beloved Aunt Rose was dying. ‘We knew – she knew – we knew she knew – she knew we knew – and none of us would talk about it when we were all together. We kept up the charade to the end. Aunt Rose was deprived, and so were we, of the coming together that should have been, when we might finally tell her what her life had given us. In this sense, my Aunt Rose died alone.’
What happens after that is the undiscovered country. But those who have gone to the frontier, glimpsed the other side, and then returned, remind us not to be afraid.
My friend Kate, who almost crossed the frontier, remembers how she knew she was dying, and seemed to be free of her body. She was moving at incredible speed towards God, and felt herself bathed in his love like an avalanche of warm light. In that brightness she realised that nothing else mattered, not sins or misfortunes or words or pains or her body. She was surprised by joy, could hardly stand it.
At the moment of death, God takes over. Our resistance fades away. In the joy of being loved by him, everything else becomes irrelevant. All the human constructs surrounding death, the medical attentions and the prayers, into unimportance as we realise that for which we were born.